1. Field of the Invention
A certain aspect of this disclosure relates to an image processing system, an image processing apparatus, and an information processing apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2008-77186 (JP2008-77186), for example, discloses a technology for setting up a virtual machine (VM) environment on an image processing apparatus to enable software programs running on multiple virtual machines (VM) to share hardware resources of the image processing apparatus.
In recent multifunction image processing apparatuses, various functions (or services) are implemented by software programs and a new function (extended function) can be created by combining the software programs.
Such image processing apparatuses preferably include high-performance hardware components to improve the performance of the functions. However, using expensive hardware components increases the product cost.
For this reason, it is desired to efficiently use limited hardware resources and thereby to achieve both low production cost and high performance.
However, with the related-art technology that tries to achieve both low production cost and high performance by optimizing the configuration of an image processing apparatus alone, it is difficult to achieve this goal when more and more functions are added to the image processing apparatus.